Freya's first religious experiences probably were pagan. I took her outside during a lunar eclipse when she was a toddler to cast a sacred circle and bless some silver coins in the water... after an hour or so, she cried, 'Enough Magic, Mummy! I am tired of the Magic!' Typical child, even if she was named after the Great Goddess.
When she was four, I took her to Islamic School to learn Arabic. Islam was part of the instruction and I did not object to that. After all, when she was six, she was sent to a Roman Catholic School and I thought that it would be to her spiritual advantage to see how both were derived from the same root.
Unfortunately, you cannot do that to a child. It is very hard even as an adult, not to belong fully to any private club or organisation and human religion, regrettably is mainly a private club that attempts to elevate its members at the expense of all outsiders.
The children at Islamic School accepted her better than those at St. Francis. The Monsignor was the worst child of all. He forbade her to take First Communion, telling me that my decision to allow her to attend Islamic School would send us both to hell. I never will forgive that small-minded man for his narrow-minded cruelty.
Fortunately, there was another priest at St. Francis who was as close to being a saint as any human being can be. His name was Father Marty Kern and may he be blessed to all eternity.
He said that he wanted his parishioners to think for themselves, to explore life and philosophy and that Knowledge should not be feared by the Church. Freya finally was able to take First Communion and choose her religion.
I did not want my child to be a bigot. I did not wish to subject her to any sort of literalism or fundamentalism. Unfortunately, it seeps through the cracks of our lives, whether in politics, society or religion. People's view of God is only as large as their own capacity to accept that they cannot control the Universe or indeed Life or Death.
When I was a child, I went to live in Nepal. There I encountered the following religions and sects: Hindus, Buddhists, Christian fundamentalist Protestants and Roman Catholics. Although there are Muslims in Nepal, I did not meet any.
The local temple was dedicated to the Goddess Chandeshwari, after whom the village was named. She is the local version of the Great Goddess Durga, a manifestation of Kali. My girlfriends went to the temple almost every morning to perform puja or worship there. They actually preferred the Goddess Saraswati, who is a more gentle Goddess, but the temple was devoted to Durga and it was Durga whom I saw when I accompanied them and obtained my tika from the priest.
The brass statues are of Durga. The two that depict her riding her lion are very naturalistic in style. The one on the far left is of Kali in her aspect of agent of Transformation. It is the Eternal Dance of Creation and Destruction. Statues of Shiva in this pose are more common than those of Kali and it was difficult for me, ignorant as I am, to finally realise it WAS Kali and not her consort. The one aspect of the dancing god that made it certain to be Kali was her outstretched tongue. Furthermore, the cobra next to the figure on which she has planted one foot signifies that this is a submissive Shiva and not a vanquished demon.
Unfortunately, one of the statues of Durga has been mutilated rather badly. Evidently, there was some damage to the statue that could not be repaired, so some one simply sliced away arms that had been damaged as well as part of the lion's tail. Does it matter in terms of the sacred nature of the statue? Who knows???
Who is Durga? The tales usually state that she was created by the gods for a specific purpose, to destroy a rival who had taken over both Earth and Heaven, banishing the Gods. In Hindu lore, the Gods are opposed by a race known as the Asuras, who often are mistaken for pure Evil but in fact, I believe, occupy a position much like that of the Etins in the old Northern mythology.
They vie with the Gods for power and some do great evil but often Gods made bargains with them. In fact, the reason for Durga's creation, according to most tales, was the fact that a specific Asura Mahisasura who had been given the boon of not being able to die at the hand of any God. Thus, the creation of a Goddess who was exempt from the terms of the agreement!
The local temple of Chandeshwari was dedicated to this awesome creation who, like the great Goddess in the Canaanite epic, unleashed total destruction upon the Earth after she completed her primary task of slaying the enemy. In the Hindu version, she becomes intoixcated and this intoxication augments her power in the great duel with the shapeshifter Mahishasura. In the Canaanite epic, the gods cannot stop Anat's killing spree until they offer her intoxicants and she finally drinks herself into a stupour.
The Goddess Diurga often is shown with her tongue hanging out of her mouth, thus depicting in a very vivid fashion her insatiable thirst for blood. She probably was worshipped long before Hinduism and the tale of her 'creation' by the Hindu gods probably was a gloss over a far more ancient and primal being. Blood sacrifice usually is a fundamental part of any fertility religion and India practiced many blood sacrifices through the ages to bring fertility to the land.
In ancient Canaan, the original religion probably was a vegetation religion as well, with primary worship of the great god Mot, who lived in the Underworld and to whom all the dead belonged. Life after death was very much a part of the belief system and tombs contained tables where the living would sup with their beloved dead regularly.
The God Ba'al, who is a sky god, probably was brought to Canaan by nomadic invaders and this marked the beginning of a cyclical reign wherein periodically Mot would be defeated by Ba'al and then rise again to become victorious over the God of the Earth. In the myth, however, it is the Goddess Anat who defeats Mot and grinds him into pieces. Mot is the ancient equivalent of course of the God of the Barley or Grain and his death describes the process by which grain is harvested, winnowed and ground into flour. Ba'al is the God of Rain and thus has his own part to play in the fertility rites. Like Dumuzi, Attis and Adonis, the sky or thunder god would go to the land of the dead for a period until brought back to life. At the point of his dying, the women of the land would perform ritual mourning and supplications would be made for his return.
It is interesting to note that one of the Hindu festivals includes a tradition very like that of the 'Adonis plants' and contemporary Iranian tradition of New Year wherein green plants that mature quickly are planted and nurtured, then thrown into running water and their death mourned.
In fact, in the old Canaanite epic, Mot is described as follows: 'his tongue outstretched between heaven and earth' or, in another translation: 'one lip to earth, one lip to heaven and his tongue outstretched to the very stars' in order to be able to swallow the sky god, Ba'al...
Mot has an unquenchable thirst, like that of Kali.
Thus, we find the equivalent of the ancient war between the Gods and the Asuras in Canaan in the form of the duel between Mot and Ba'al and the equivalent of Durga is Anat.
I always have found the argument that a Pagan tradition should be rejected by Christianity totally absurd. Christianity is rooted in all the ancient mystery religions and I really have come to believe that Christ was a follower of Dionysus or his equivalent and that his crucifixion and resurrection were familiar to contemporaries from the annual mystery of the death and resurrection of Attis and before that, Dumuzi.
There are many common factors that connect the old Vedic religion with the Canaanites and other pre-Arab religions. Ba'al mates with a heifer, a sacred cow. 'He lies with her seven times and seventy times, Yes... eight times and eighty times and she conceives and bears a male'. The sacred cow is part of the Hindu tradition of course and represents the Earth herself.
The Canaanite text that describes the ritual slaying of Mot is as follows: 'She seizes Mot the son of El, With a blade she cleaves him, With a shovel she winnows him, With fire she parches him, With a millstone she grinds him, In the field she sows him; His remains the birds eat, The wild creatures consume his fragments, Remains from remains are sundered.'
Of course, this is a description of the Death of the Barley God but it is mirrored as well by the ritual sacrifice of the King in ancient times, a sacrifice that still is enacted during the Festival of Durga in Nepal, when a Buffalo is killed and the remains cut into tiny pieces and flung to the devotees who sow the meat in their fields to bring a good harvest. Once that sacrifice was human..
There are passages in the same Canaanite epic that describe the slaying of the dragon or serpent Yamm by Ba'al. In Vedic myth, the ocean was churned by a great serpent for the Water of Life or immortality and a deadly poison that could have destroyed the entire universe emerged from the mouth of the great snake. Shiva drank the poison in order to save the universe and thus his neck turned blue. The serpent in the ocean, whether Yamm or Ouroboros (the snake who swallows its own tail) is a very universal motif and often one that, if not evil in itself, threatens the world somehow. In the Northern mythology, the Midgard Serpent has Thor as its foe and once, when fishing, Thor brings up the World Serpent on his line and wrestles with it for a time, while the Midgard Snake drips blood and poison from its fangs. It ultimately sinks back down into the ocean, allowing the world's cycle to continue for the day it rises completely from the waters marks the end of the world's cycle.
Thor, like Shiva is a Storm God, a Sky God and his Hammer Mjolnir is akin to Shiva's trisul or Trident. In fact, the Hammer originally may have been a Trident as it has three sides to it, almost a stylised triangle rather than a cylinder like the hammers we use today.
I do not know if Thor had hermaphrodite aspects ever but a famous myth places him in a disguise as the Goddess Freya at a wedding to one of the giants. He goes in order to rescue his Hammer and succeeds in doing so. Certainly both Odhinn the All=Father and Loki spent time as women and the latter actually gave birth to some very significant and powerful beings in his female aspect.
There is nothing new under the sun, is there? To me, the fact that a tradition stretches back as far as human memory gives it legitimacy, and the rites of Yule and the birth of the God are valid partly because these rites predate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. God is Eternal and Infinite and tales of the Divine are simply small windows into a Great Mystery we never will be able to comprehend fully even though scientists have split the atom and learned the secrets of the Universe's power to generate both creation and destruction. We are fools who become intoxicated with a little power and knowledge and then use it to attempt to elevate ourselves at the expense of any one who tells a slightly different version of the same story.
In any event, when early in April, I began to have vivid dreams about Nepal and finally decided that I could write about that very emotional and traumatic period in my childhood, I began to think about the Goddess Durga before all others in the Hindu pantheon. What is interesting here perhaps is that, when Freya was little, we used to visit a local Hindu shop and I told her she could choose whatever brass statue she liked most. She instantly chose a statue of the Goddess Kali or Durga.
Not the gentle Saraswati or Laxmi, the Mother of the ever-popular elephant-headed Ganesh. Nor was she drawn primarily to Ganesh, who is so much like Babar, a character she loved. No, she chose the Warrior Goddess Durga and indeed, the statue she wanted depicted the Goddess with spear in hand.
We did not do much with the statues of Durga. I placed them on a shelf and they gathered dust there for years. At that point in time, I still was trying to keep the door shut on my memories to some extent. I was simply amused and somewhat pleased by my daughter's choice of a strong, fighting Goddess over any male power or a Goddess who, like Laxmi, devoted herself to a male deity.
Durga stands alone for the most part. According to some traditions, she did have children, but her greatest attribute is her incredible ability to fight.
Dumezil, the great French comparitive mythologist, attempted to trace the Celtic and Nordic myths back to the Aryan traditions of India. To some extent, he succeeded in making strong arguments for a clear line of descent from ancient Indian gods to the Northern pagan Gods but I think myth and religion are more complex than that.
For a start, the Indian traditions are later mutations of far more ancient traditions that no longer are known. Hinduism is fairly new in the eternal scheme of things. Secondly, I do believe that every group had its own unique traditions and belief systems that mirrored those of people halfway across the globe simply because some concepts are universal.
People ALWAYS traveled and shared ideas, as far back as the Neolithic age. The fact that we do not have books of myths and religious rites from that era may make it a little more difficult to discover the names of the Gods the people worshipped but burial rites do provide clues as to their fundamental beliefs.
Tiamat is a very ancient powerful Mother Goddess. She ultimately went to war with the other gods and gave birth to 'monsters' in order to provide herself with allies. The God Marduk defeated her and split her in half, and there is the creation of heaven and earth as we know it. In this ancient Sumerian myth, the Great Goddess is female and her army basically are the equivalent of the Asuras. The male god Marduk is the champion and saviour of the Gods, the equivalent of Durga in Hindu myth.
Even in Christianity, there are the angels who essentially probably began as the equivalents of the Asuras, beings with great powers, almost Gods themselves. Lucifer, the Star of the Morning, rebelled against the primal Deity and was cast out of Heaven but he was not evil per se. The Asuras are not Evil per se, nor are the Etins. In Northern myth, many of the Gods intermarried with Etin-kind. Freya's wife Gerd is a Giant. Loki married a Giant and from that union came the serpent that encircles the Earth, the Fenris Wolf and the Goddess Hel who has charge of the land of the Underworld.
Energies are neither good nor evil and many of the Gods and Asuras represent Energies of a primal nature. The real battle probably is between Order and Chaos but both are necessary in order to fuel Life, Death and Rebirth in the form of Change. Epic battles that end the World are all a part of this eternal need for Change, to sweep away the old and allow space for the new. Ragnarok is one such battle.
One of the reasons I rather like the weblog concept is because one is not bound to any particular topic or format... thus, I come finally to the little naturalistic statues of Durga in the photographs.
Is this a Goddess or a beautiful woman? Can a true Goddess be a Beautiful Woman or does human female beauty diminish power to some extent? I do know that I cannot fear Durga in these manifestations but if I see a primitive form of Her with long tongue outstretched, skulls hanging round her waist and weapons of destruction in every hand, I do fear her mightily. Why then would I choose these pretty women?
I suppose it is an aesthetic choice as well as one that mirrors my love of beautiful dolls. I like the idea of having a friend in a Goddess and of finding beauty in worship. The statues I have of the Blessed Virgin are pretty women for the most part, made according to old Italian standards of beauty. The woodcarvers working for Anri, for example, crafted gorgeous little statues of Our Lady and I love them.
In my own life now, I come face to face with pain and the gradual diminishment of my own life on a daily basis. I suppose I do not need to be reminded of Kali's insatiable need for blood. I feel it in the crumbling of my own bones, in the sharp pain to my nerves each time I move, in the way that I have lost the power to walk and run and do many of the things I loved most.
So I prefer to see Durga as a beautiful but still potent woman on her Lion, to perform my puja to a Goddess in a guise that is quintessentially feminine in human terms without losing her divine nature. That is what I suspect in any event.
I do know that I cannot enter a room in a museum that is filled with Mesoamerican artifacts without being sick to my stomach. Egyptian and Assyrian statues of Gods and Goddesses have a similar effect, albeit not quite as potent. I can FEEL the effects of blood sacrifice, of the rapacious demands of those Aztec and Mayan Gods. Have we experienced past lives? Who knows? I have had countless strangers approach me, claiming to have known me as an Aztec, Mayan or Egyptian from centuries past. I do know that I have had horribly vivid dreams about these periods in history ever since I was a very young girl. When we studied the Aztecs in grammar school, I immediately RECOGNISED the culture. It was spooky, even terrifying.
In a similar way, the statues that survive of the Norse gods are primal and frightening in their raw power. Great bulging eyes are the focal point of those rough-hewn wooden statues or colossal stone images. They scream power to the worshipper even though the people who followed the religion certainly did not believe that their Gods resided in stone or wood. They believed in the power of glades, of primeval forests and ancient deep lakes and rivers. Godes cannot be pinned down in images or symbols. Those images and symbols are only guideposts to the ultimate inchoate Power of Divinity.
